Karōshi

The word karōshi, written 過労死, combines the characters for excess (過), labor (労), and death (死). The first documented case occurred in 1969, when a young shipping worker at a major Japanese newspaper died of a stroke attributed to shift work and an increased workload. His death was initially classified as occupational sudden death. It was not until 1982 that three physicians, Tajiri Seiichiro, Hosokawa Michio, and Uehata Tetsunojō, published the first book using the term karōshi, bringing the phenomenon into public consciousness.

Japan's postwar economic expansion had created conditions in which extreme working hours were not an aberration but a structural feature. By 1988, the Labor Force Survey reported that nearly one-quarter of male workers, roughly 7.8 million people, were logging more than sixty hours per week. That same year, physicians established the Karoshi Hotline, receiving over 1,800 calls in its first two years of operation. The Ministry of Labour began publishing karōshi statistics in 1987, formally acknowledging what workers' families had been arguing for nearly two decades.

High-profile cases forced the issue into international awareness. In 2008, a Toyota engineer who had averaged more than eighty hours of overtime per month was posthumously ruled a victim of karōshi. Japan's 2014 Karoshi Prevention Act mandated national initiatives to reduce overwork-related disorders. The legislation set a target of increasing the rate of taken annual paid leave to seventy percent, an acknowledgment that the culture of work had made rest itself something that required government intervention.

The word has since been borrowed into English and adopted, in translation, by South Korea (gwarosa) and China (guolaosi). The International Labour Organization has cited karōshi in its reports on global working conditions. As of 2025, Japan's government continues to report record numbers of recognized overwork-related health disorders, with more than 1,300 cases in the most recent data.